Matt Hall Wins Week ending 13th Sept 2019

Welcome to my Friday dribble where we talk things agri sport and life.

We caught up with Freedom Foods Ltd CEO Rory Macleod this week for an update on the business. Most parts of their business are pumping with massive growth in their plant based beverages division, namely almond “milk”. Their biggest division, dairy and nutritional ingredients, is growing strongly both here and overseas.

One interesting point to come out of their presentation, and others that are China facing, is that it’s not just China that is growing. Other S.E Asian countries like Vietnam, Cambodia and Malaysia are growing strongly as importers of aussie products

This week we some very poorly researched reports in The Australian newspaper and other sources about water usage in the Murray Darling system. The core of the article was suggesting that water was being held back by so called institutional water investors to push up prices. It named Duxton Water (asx; D2O) as a culprit. It was also suggested by a big olive tree farmer that it may not be appropriate for institutional investors or non-land owners to hold water entitlements.

In my opinion the article in The Australian is babbling BS. Firstly, as reported in the Duxton Water Ltd ASX announcement on Sept 10th, they own approx. 75t megalitres of permanent water entitlements, out of 9.5M megalitres on issue. That’s less than 1%.... On top of that Duxton have only received about 53% of their general security entitlement. Pretty hard to manipulate a market when you own less than 1% isn’t it..?? Secondly, the olive tree farmer, who holds no water entitlements, sold them to an industry super fund years ago…. An institutional investor..!!

The simple fact is we are in a drought….there isn’t enough water to go around and when you combine this with the fact that more water is needed now for permanent planting, the price invariably goes up. It’s called a free market, dude…!!

P.S. the author has been buying D2O shares this week.

On sport and 2 BIG winners this week. The aussie cricket team retained the ashes on English soil for the first time since Steve Waugh.

But the big sports news this week was Matt Hall became the first Aussie to win the Red Bull air race championship when he came 3rd in the final race of the season. Matt is a former RAAF fighter pilot who started flying gliders when he was too young to drive a car…!!! He went on to fly not only for our air force, but the US air force and then moved into aerobatics and then the Red Bull series. A seriously awesome effort from a true aussie champion.